How I Escaped From Somali Pirates | Minutes With | @LADbible TV

he gestured at me just as i was holding the phone trying to get through to the office in london uh with his gun and he cocked his kalashnikov in very aggressive fashion and uh waved it at me and it was pretty clear that what he was intending to do or threatening to do was wait until i was on the phone to the office and then he was going to either fire the gun right beside me or belt me in the face with a gun or something [Music] the piracy had been going on in the gulf of eden ever since the late 90s what they used to do was they would hijack the ship and they would effectively steal the ship's crew if you like they would take the crew hostage and hopefully extract a ransom my photographer colleague and i were sent to somalia to do some reporting on the ground about to really just try and find out a bit about how the pirates operated we went to a town called basasso which is on the northern somali coast uh and um that was a place where you could see a lot of pirate money coming in um you see people driving around in brand new suvs big new villas going up in what is otherwise a very very poor part of the world i also knew it was it could be a dangerous place for westerners to visit as a westerner you stand out there's not many foreigners in somalia and uh what you tend to do is to stop yourself getting kidnapped is you hire a group of bodyguards you pay them about 20 bucks a day each and they carry kalashnikov each you have seven or eight of them and they follow you around and the idea is that they just deter anyone really from making any kind of attempt to kidnap you can you tell me how they kidnapped you yeah well on the very last day we suddenly got a different bunch of bodyguards that all the bodyguards had to do was to drive us to the airport um so we thought fine um we drove off and uh we were in um one pickup truck and the bodyguards were sitting in the back of another pickup truck all of a sudden as we were driving through one of the outskirts of town the bodyguard's pickup truck shot in front of our vehicle and uh forced our vehicle to halt and a couple of the bodyguards jumped out waving their guns and shouting then the bodyguards ran towards our car pulled the doors open and ordered both me and my colleague out at gunpoint and at that point i realized i was getting kidnapped they dragged us over into their pickup truck they stuck us in the front cabin and then we drove off at top speed out of the town and into a desert area the car drove across the desert for about 40 minutes and then drove up into the foothills of a range of mountains uh we got to a point where the car could drive no further just at the top of a gravel track and we were ordered out of the car um and just they said right start marching up this track up a canyon it was a very very empty area um i couldn't didn't see another soul anywhere around at one point we stopped after about a mile in a clearing and uh um i remember one of the one of the guys looking at me and earlier on when i hadn't been walking fast enough he'd sort of pointed the gun at me and like you know as if to say if you don't keep walking you're gonna get a bullet in your head um and so when we stopped at this point i thought maybe maybe they're just gonna kill us maybe this isn't a kidnapping uh and one of the kidnappers reached into a bag that he had over his shoulder and uh to my surprise he pulled out a um a few mars bars and um some uh bottles of drinking water and he said yeah drink drink or whatever and it was at that point we realized that they were going to keep us alive although we had no idea what they were going to do with us can you tell me what your day-to-day life was like well it really was like pretty much like living like a stone age man we had no tv no books to read we weren't allowed to use a paper and pencil or anything like that so there was very little way to spend the time then the food we had we ate goat meat freshly cooked goat and rice each day that was pretty much it for um breakfast lunch and dinner and then we had nothing for um uh you know going to the you you go to the bathroom with a tool uh they recommended using a stick to wipe your rear end with which no no a stone which i didn't really fancy so you just use your hand unfortunately and a bit of water but this was the same water that you haven't used to drink with we were guarded all times by about eight to a dozen guards in fact they were a very disciplined bunch it was like being kidnapped by an army unit of some sort well i had no reason to believe that they were but they were extremely disciplined in everything they did what was your relationship like with your captors and one of the things they say is try and form a relationship a bit of a rapport with the kidnappers um the idea being that that will make it more difficult for them to kill you so i remember about three or four days into the kidnapping we hadn't really spoken to the kidnappers much at that point and um they they didn't speak any english really i didn't speak any somali um the only language we had in common was arabic i have i speak a few words of arabic and they spoke a few too so that was kind of how we communicated and um on about day three or four one of the guys a young guy called faisal he came up to us and he pointed at me and he said you from where you and uh so i said i'm i thought i'll just be honest so i said i'm from britain uh and he went ah britain britain good david beckham paul scholes manchester united uh tierra yori and i thought oh wow you know the international language of football um spoken even here in the mountains of somalia but it gave us all a bit of a laugh it made you realize how strange the situation was about four or five days into the kidnapping we were led to the top of a mountain near the cave where the kidnappers were able to get a reception on their mobile phone and they told us to call my office in london which i duly did one of the kidnappers um a guy we used to call the old because he didn't like us and he was old um he uh he gestured at me just as i was holding the the phone trying to get through to the office in london uh with his gun and he told me come and he gestured as if to say come and sit at my you know just in front of me because he was standing just a few feet away um uh and he cocked his kalashnikov in very aggressive fashion and uh waved it at me and it was pretty clear that what he was intending to do or threatening to do uh was wait until i was on the phone to the office and then he was going to either fire the gun right beside me or belt me in the face with a gun or something or do something so that when i was on the phone to the office i'd be screaming like do what you gotta do to get these people out to get these people off me to get me out of here you know or whatever and that was a pretty scary moment the other kidnappers at that point actually dragged him away from me and they dragged him down the mountain aside and i just ignored him i sat where i was and they um i got through the office and i just said look we've been kidnapped but we are still alive um and we're not being mistreated we're being held in a cave in uh into some mountains somewhere but that was a big relief to everybody back home because until that point they had no idea or they had no certainty that we were still alive but i remember from that moment onwards being pretty scared of him and thinking like you know these guys might start torturing us uh if they wanted to and that was that that made me that put the fear of god in me a lot whilst you were being held hostage did they ever make any threats to sell you they did at one point threaten to sell us to another pirate gang who were operating further down the coast one morning um a couple of guys who were clearly not from the the gang that was holding us uh turned up at the cave there was a bit of conversation in somali so we didn't know what was going on but we could tell it wasn't friendly and then all of a sudden the commotion uh broke out and uh our guys started pushing these two visitors out of the cave and someone at that point pulled a handgun i don't know who it was whether it was a lot or the other lot um and fired it into the ceiling of the cave this bullet i remember it bounced several times off the walls and creased the mat on which my colleague and i were sitting outside we couldn't see what was going on but we could hear gunfire these two guys who had been kicked out suddenly reappeared on a distant cliff edge that overlooked our cave um with a couple of their colleagues and they started firing down into our cave with their own guns it was like being in a some wild west movies bullets pinging around all this sort of thing um to make matters worse um uh one of the kidnappers who was with us then decided that we would be safer if we were actually hidden behind some rocks outside of the cave there was a big pile of boulders there so uh he got a big machine gun uh with a bullet belt that he wrapped around his shoulders looking like rambo and said right come on out this way so we followed him out and um uh he hid us behind these boulders and um uh said like lie down in that space there unfortunately this this set of boulders was also the place that we'd been using for the last couple of weeks as our main toilet area you know i've got a choice here either um lie down and in a pool of my own sort of piss or keep my head up and just getting it shut off um i think it's fair to say that was a kind of that was a low point in the whole thing with a pirate putting a price on your head at one point they asked for money for us they asked for three million dollars each they told the kidnappers that as we were journalists there was no way they were going to pay any money for us um and that uh you know we were there to write about the problems that were going on in somalia at the time and that you know if uh people kept on getting kit foreigners who visited the country kept on getting kidnapped that would only make somalia's problems worse can you explain how you were eventually freed after six weeks in captivity we were told by the kidnappers that we were finally going to be freed we weren't told why we were getting freed uh we got a phone call from london saying um tomorrow morning you will be taken to a rendezvous point elsewhere in the mountains and you will be met by a group of somali clan leaders who have agreed to act as go-betweens in the situation and you will be handed over to them there was about 50 guys uh there um all armed to the teeth with rocket-propelled grenades belt-fed machine guns anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks it's a small army we were driven up um over a mountain pass um where we stopped and told to get out the car and then we looked down into this valley and at the bottom of the valley we could see um several other cars um driven clearly by these um clan intermediaries also we were told and the kidnappers pointed to a path that was leading down to the bottom of this mountain pass and they said walk down there with your hands up and don't make any silly moves we'll be right behind you um so we julie walked down this path hands up like this expecting to hear bullets suddenly erupting at any minute or and that the whole thing would end in disaster uh we julie got down at the bottom and um we were handed over and uh one of these um somali elders um uh sort of elderly man in a suit he said ah you know welcome you are now free i remember there was a moment when we were handed over to the uh the clan elder i turned around and i looked at the the lead kidnapper and i thought what are you supposed to say or do in this situation you know are you supposed to sort of um uh tell them or something like that and you know hope that you'll see him in court one day or do you sort of say well actually you know you didn't mistreat us too much um he was actually quite professional about the whole thing maybe shake his hand no i don't think so um and just as i was making up my mind wondering whether to just kind of nod farewell he turned away and marched up the hill anyway without so much as a second glance do you feel any anger towards them i feel anger towards them about you know what they put my family through which was hell for some people it's seen as really the only way of making a living but on the other hand i met many somalis um when i was that out there before we were kidnapped who were saying look we are really worried about this piracy thing because we have a generation of young men who are growing up thinking that kidnapping and hostage-taking are the only way uh to lead a to make a living and uh you know that that is no future for our country i was actually out having dinner um with some friends and um i got a phone call from my dad and um we have an agreement where that if you ring once you're just calling for a chat you ring twice or more then i know there's something wrong and i need to actually stop what i'm doing so the phone was ringing and i answered the phone and i heard his voice and i just said straight away like who's died

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Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral videos, viral, funny, comedy, funny videos, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, journalism, culture, somalian pirate, pirate, journalist, investigative reporter, captain phillips, held for ransom, at gunpoint, piracy, gulf of aden pirates attack, pirate attack, sea shanty tiktok

Id: kwwTbz39ALg

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021